A couple of months back, Tim
Procter, Sheeri Cabral and I were discussing about how
best to diagnose a MySQL server and/or tune its performance,
automating the process as much as possible. The
Performance Advisors from MySQL
Enterprise do this, but most of our customers don’t have a
subscription and Pythian’s collective experience is not necessary
reflected by its rules.

In our daily work, we have used Major Heyden’s MySQL Tuner,
Mark
Leith’s Statpack and our own tools to review a MySQL server
configuration parameters. However, all of these tools had
limitations in regards of what we wanted to achieve. Our major …

This is an issue that keeps rearing its ugly head over and over
again, and since it greatly affects performance, it is most
important that DBAs of any DMBS running on Linux come to grips
with it. So I decided to do some research and try different
settings on my notebook. Here are my findings.

What can you find on the web?

A Wikipedia search for the word swappiness will come up
empty (any volunteers out there want to write an article?). A
Google search will show some pretty old material—the best article
I found is from 2004: Linux: Tuning Swappiness. This article
includes a detailed discussion with some interesting remarks by
Andrew Morton, a Linux kernel maintainer.

So, what is swappiness?

Towards the end of the email thread quoted in the article, you’ll
find this definition (sort of):

Quick... You have to let everyone (boss, biz dev, customer
service, and random bean counters) know why everything is moving
slowly! Of course, rarely do people define what "everything" is,
and what type of slowness is occuring. But, in the face of
customer service agents that cannot work because their pages will
not render, generally all eyes are on the
famed-dba-of-the-minute.So, with 7 people

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